U+hhhh[h[h]] NAME syntax

Marcel Schneider charupdate at orange.fr
Sat Aug 13 03:42:18 CDT 2016


On Fri, 12 Aug 2016 23:22:50 -0700, Sean Leonard wrote:
[…]
> 
> It is the way that the Unicode Standard 9.0.0 refers to particular 
> characters, and I have seen it around quite a bit. The Unicode Standard 
> appears to put the NAME in small-caps format (but a plain text PDF 
> search using Adobe Acrobat DC suggests that the underlying characters 
> are lowercase), while in plain text, the name is generally 
> all-capitalized (as it appears in the UCD).
> 
[…]

I see your concern with the casing issue. Indeed, when we copy a snippet
of TUS to the clipboard, the character names are all lowercased and need 
an additional step to become conformant, whether case conversion if 
remaining in plain text, or small caps formatting again. Automating the 
process would be possible however by writing up a script parsing code points
and matching names with UCD.

BTW this was one of the issues I fed back when v8.0.0 was in beta past year:
http://www.unicode.org/review/pri297/feedback.html

>>> To improve quotability, I would suggest to typeset the character 
>>> names (which actually are in small caps) in uppercase throughout,
>>> and to apply rather a reduced font size like specified in the style 
>>> sheet of UAX #9 (where, however, redundant formatting leads to lowercase
>>> and small-cap the uppercase source text at the same time (“span.name { 
>>> text-transform: lowercase; font-variant: small-caps; font-size: 75%; }”).
>>> The result was not convincing as it appeared in UAX #9, section 3.2.

Actually Iʼm managing this with a dedicated CSS style that sets character
names back to lowercase:
.uniname {                   /* CHAR STYLES */
text-transform: lowercase;
font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 110%;
} /* as opposed to: */
.name {
font-variant: small-caps;
font-size: 110%;
}

Additionally, to throttle up your work speed, you might wish to have the 
“U+” sequence on your keyboard, precisely on your numerical keypad along 
with hexadecimal digits in the Shift shift state. I’m actually using this 
feature, which Iʼve added in my layout on Windows, but I havenʼt yet 
documented it on line. If you or somebody else are interested, please 
follow up off list.

Marcel



More information about the Unicode mailing list